Your Right to Know

Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoYonhap News Agency via APThe guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen arrives in Donghae, South Korea, on Saturday for joint military exercises as South Korean sailors wave national flags.

By Paul EckertREUTERS • Monday March 11, 2013 6:48 AM

WASHINGTON — The United States and its allies are applying a new form of pressure on North
Korea, already facing a tightening ring of United Nations sanctions over its nuclear and missile
tests: tougher U.N. censure of Pyongyang’s human-rights record.

The European Union and Japan are circulating a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council in
Geneva calling for a formal commission of inquiry into North Korea’s record.

The U.S.-backed move could, in theory, lay the foundation for referring North Korea to the
International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity for its system of gulag penal camps and
other serious abuses.

More significant, former U.S. officials and rights experts say, the action is helping to break
down a de facto separation of human rights and nuclear diplomacy in Western dealings with North
Korea.

“Exposing the North’s brutality toward its own citizens has not been a priority component of
U.S. policy,” Robert Joseph, the top State Department disarmament diplomat in the George W. Bush
administration, told a U.S. Senate hearing on Thursday.

“In fact, concerns about how such exposure might affect the prospects for engagement with the
regime have worked to place human-rights atrocities in a separate box which is mostly neglected if
seen as complicating higher-order diplomacy,” he said.

An informal draft of the EU-Japan text was circulated and discussed in Geneva on Friday. It
calls for the U.N. Human Rights Council to set up a two-member commission of inquiry for a year to
investigate systematic, widespread and grave rights violations in North Korea, diplomats in Geneva
said.

Some Asian countries on the council are expected to call for a vote on the resolution in the
final week of the four-week annual session, which ends March 22, the diplomats said.

Although there is no veto on the 47-member-state council, the absence of traditional North Korea
allies China and Russia is seen as beneficial to smooth negotiations.

North Korea has been the target of critical U.N. resolutions on its human-rights record in
Geneva or New York in each of the past 10 years, and its prison camps have been the subject of
tough reports from the independent U.N. special investigator on North Korea, an Indonesian lawyer
named Marzuki Darusman.

But North Korea has vehemently denied all allegations and stonewalled U.N. investigators. And
the U.S. policy focus for the past two decades has been not on human rights but on Pyongyang’s
expanding nuclear weapons and missile programs that are the subject of multiple rounds of U.N.
sanctions.

Meanwhile, South Korea has been welcoming U.S. forces for a joint training exercise and for an
11-day computer-simulated drill, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.

The drill, called Key Resolve, involves 10,000 South Korean forces and 3,500 U.S. soldiers along
with combat planes and an aircraft carrier. South Korea says the drill is for defensive purposes
only, but the North contends that it targets the North and reflects the allies’ plans to invade the
country.

Denouncing the military drills, the North has threatened to wage a nuclear war and cancel the
Armistice Agreement that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea is also expected to launch nationwide military exercises near the inter-Korea border
today or Tuesday.

The communist country is likely to fire short-range missiles or launch other military
provocations during their military drills, a South Korean military source said.